Connecting through creativity

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Click here to catch up on Part 1… So, after tasting universal love I had two options: retreat into bliss and keep surfing my supernova, or use this new platform as permission to seek out compatible abundances to honour my temporal self. This is a crazy world, and keeping our bodies, our little frictions in the flow, alert and alive can be a tedious business. But did I really want to sacrifice my humanity to white, black, or orange robes and hide in ritual? Because the power of this ultimate connection really does invite a full commitment. Robes seem to be the de facto uniform, and meditative ritual a psychological shortcut to sustaining the connection. I’ll stick with folding laundry, thank you very much. I get how, beyond simplicity and modesty, these robes echo the times of the founders of these stories, but we live in an individualist time and culture when even a good belt isn’t enough to go from robe to runway. Heaven forbid Kanye West finds nirvana and we all end up in nude body spanx – the horror!

And anyway, any uniformed, persistent bliss is essentially an escape from your humanity, paralleling drug addiction or workaholism – death through life in my opinion. So throw on some ass huggin’ jeans and claim the right to explore your own story of abundance! I suggest a moment to moment respect, honour, and yes, love of this brief sneeze, supported by your universal self.

How? By bringing personal authority back to your consciousness through simple mindfulness meditation (observing thoughts without judgement), then using this new position of observer to search for and support a new set of attentions and attitudes focused on freeing the flow of energy through your system. These attentions should be chosen to reflect your genetic coding and guide you towards healthier habits and deeper connections. Once you’ve selected a new set of attentions to try on for size, next step is to fake it till ya’ make it! Only repetition will imbed them into your neural wiring and, before long, your identity. Note: your observer self will evolve into your universal self when you can start projecting it beyond your own body. Not a good idea to try on a first date, but fun times once you get the hang of it. All terminology aside, the central concept here is to develop a safe place for your ego to sit while its underwear drawer is reorganized.

You might be thinking, “when’s she gonna whip out the chakras and eightfold path stuff?” Pleeease. If Buddha can sit under The Bodhi Tree and say, “screw it! I ain’t budging till I figure this shit out,” you can too! We all can. It’s the great privilege of human consciousness – use it or lose it baby. But who’s got that kind of time? Enlightenment can be a bitch to reach, even just to taste. Seriously. So, while you’re training your universal self, start questioning your current attentions and ask yourself: “does this support my system’s most biologically blissful energy flow?” Or just cut right to the chase, all nomenclature aside… “do I want to want this?”

I’m no guru. I want you to have the authority. This is a journey, ongoing, and I just want what you want: to wake up looking forward to the day. If my story, my translation of universal bliss resonates with you, excellent. If not, there are a thousand other paths to take, all leading to the same great love. Because we’re all reaching for it. My journey becomes real in the sharing of it – and isn’t that the very essence of our humanity?

Why alter the attentions of our little friction in the universe? Why change? Love. Not for family, friends, not for any ideal, country or even love of self; because the self is a violent sneeze, a brief yet explosive misting of mucus soon lost to time. Eloquent, I know. True change courts a love beyond our humanity, known only when we offer ourselves wholly to the unorderable bliss of the universe. Bring that love home, and your human connections can finally become what they need to be – your reality and guide to purpose.

Universal love, this ultimate connection, is experienced by our bodies as unimpeded energy flow – when we stop holding and fighting and trying to control the wild coursing motion of time and space through our physical selves. We story this love and God is real. Bring the story closer, deeper, into the private universe of your seething, sparkling brain. How far can we reach into love from this landscape?

After years of dedicated creative mindfulness meditation I was ready to risk the ultimate thought experiment. My greatest fear? Death (sooo original). What is the greatest death? The death of a star… And so I gave in, collected all my energies and released – knowing I might never come back. Because you can’t see death without risking (at the very least) everything you believe – not to be too dramatic or anything. And so, with every atom of my being, I became a supernova. Note: this thought experiment, mind you, came after years of playing in geological time and countless embarrassing moments of “I am the rock” (and the more advanced) “I am the tree” projections of my consciousness on my walk home from work. Because I’m cool like that.

Now back to the supernova. To my surprise, it was the most glorious full-being-gasm of my life!! (and I’m a multiple girl ~wink) If the french define an orgasm as “the little death,” this was, dear readers, the megaton – the big one. Instantaneously, every particle and energy blasted outwards in all directions, filling space and time with the spectacular essence of… me. I became abundance. And what was left of my humanity was swept swirling into the clouds from where I was standing. Because yes, I was standing, I may have a flexible brain but these knees will never lotus. Obviously, words can never describe this experience, and gawd I’ve tried. All I can say is that I burst out crying and felt for the very first time in my life that “everything was going to be ok.” And maybe that’s the best, most human, way to describe it.

Actually, I wasn’t just standing; I was folding laundry. A gal’s got to keep herself grounded somehow! And here’s the crux of my argument: from all I’ve read it would seem unlikely that anyone could touch enlightenment while folding laundry – except of course Martha Stewart (but apparently it didn’t stick) – I can only share my story. It’s all I am and all I have. Because I’m human and you’re human, and a side-effect of this condition is that we cannot sustain continuous universal bliss if we want to keep our little friction alive. So what are our options? How can we keep this connection alive in our relationships and day to day reality? How can our universal self give us the space to change? And more importantly, after tasting bliss, what do we wear?

The void is being in love with two men, two stories, two promises. One glows with the promised flush of that first hot thrust. Immediate gratification. The other tantalizes with the promise of a full to bursting future, but it’s a happily ever after that pulls further away with every desperate reach from within the void. Because while your brain chemistry adjusts to reward a new set of attentions, and you progress towards real change, there is no way to ignore that first lover’s little whisper in your ear… “I swear,” it teases, titillates, “this will be the last time.”

Of course you and I both know this is insanity! But it’s our most irresistible limbic lie. From within the void, old rituals, however banal, suddenly light up with religious exaltation. Cutting out caffeine? Sitting on the dock… lake lapping gently… sun spreading in dappled strips across the cool sand, opening nature’s blinds on another perfect day… and here comes your happily ever after with a latte and the eager smile of a man knowing he is bringing only pleasure. How could you say no to that first tickle of fresh foam? To that warmth? To that sparkling deep body kiss that lifts your entire being to match to glory of the day. How could any future fullness reject such easy magic?

That little voice is your most dangerous lover, because he/she was your first and no one will ever know better how to seduce you: your limbic mascot (you can see my ‘Mitch the insatiable itch’ taunting me above ~wink). It’s that one primal part of you that not just knows but feels your mortality – every second of every day. It can’t commit – why would it? – to the unfathomable horror of any life of ‘less than’. And so you let yourself imagine taking that first hot sip… the flood opens and suddenly your brain is humming with dopamine. You’re smiling at strangers and there’s a skip in your step. With a true craving satisfaction doesn’t matter (actually part of a different brain structure) because in the end, the scratch of any itch is only the quieting of want. This disconnect is one reason why the permission is very nearly as chemically exciting as the actual behaviour/substance. We story our basic biological responses into worlds of ‘less than’ or ‘more than most’ but true abundance is not found in any “quieting of want.” And tapping into its most powerful source is our ultimate human permission. My nose is tingling just thinking about it!

WARNING!!! Yes, from the soul blinding dearth of the void the thrill of submission to old rituals is intoxicating, even irresistible. Dear readers, I am on this journey with you and have just spent a month bathing lasciviously in what are unarguably isolating rituals, born of protection but now just kicking my ass. I am anything but the poster child for perfection. Machete in hand, I’m just trying my best to clear the path. Yes, the release, the neurotransmitter thrill of purity of purpose is one of the great gifts of the human experience. But it is not a place of poetry. In the void this is a place of fear – disguised as a naked schoolgirl in your lap or the last three sparkling strides of a touchdown run. The story feels too good to be true because it is. And as the orgasm fades, or the cup or bank account is drained, all that’s left is the salty metaphorical crumble in the bottom of the KFC bucket. And you’re all alone again, gasping, puking in the unforgiving blackness of the void. So you’d better remind yourself why you’re here…

I want change because I want a more connected and exciting future. No, that’s too abstract, and abstract isn’t worth shit down here in the void! I’m here because I wanna have more fun. I wanna share my creativity and blow open this life. I wanna be able to supernova any time I want. I want change because I WANT!!! And you want too!!! Maybe even more than I do. Only one way forward… to brave the void long enough to start altering our attentions so that we can finally give our happily ever afters the chance to reach out to us.

STOP whatever you’re doing and SMELL where you are… take a long, slow, lazy sniff of this moment and watch its molecular landscape paint itself across your brain. Now draw a few shorter more urgent breaths and pay close attention to new layers and nuances that add texture, peaks and valleys to this internal mapping. Play at humanizing this universe by adding the intimacy of your inner elbow. When you focus your concentration, your complete conscious awareness, on any attention, it becomes your entire world for that breath – and every breath, being our most human quantization, is a life lived in full.

So change? Change is the process of altering our attentions. And we need an access point to get in there and get nitty gritty about switching our patterns of attention from automatic to manual. There’s a reason race cars have manual transmission: delicacy of control to maximize power and performance. Mindfulness, bringing a non-judgmental awareness to the present moment, is your access key. Through practice, conscious observation of our internal and external attentions (paying attention to our attentions) has been proven to build grey matter in your brain’s prefrontal reasoning/decision making area (your reality negotiator) while reducing the size and pervasive connectivity of your fight or flight, get-it-while-it’s-hot emotional amygdala. Interestingly, this process of bringing authority back to personal consciousness within the brain eventually rewires our natural resting state so you don’t have to walk around sniffing your elbow on public transit like a crazy person to experience the benefits of mindful living.

Now let’s get back to the void, that dopamine dearth that prevents so many of us from reshuffling our habits and patterns of attention. Because it’s dark down there, lonely and brutal because suddenly everything in us is begging and scratching for the chemical reward of familiarity. Yes, dedicated mindfulness meditation quiets your screaming toddler amygdala while also having the power to directly influence our genes’ epigenetic expression to help bring our attentions to a whole new genetic honesty (bit of a gritty read) but all abstraction aside, you need an immediate handhold down in the abyss.

Mindfulness gives you two: the dopamine payoff of curiosity and a moment to moment space beyond reaction. Curiosity is one of the most primitive, potent stimulators of our dopamine reward system. Grab hold and max it out! The void can be hell, sure, but it’s full of unique and fascinating body sensations and urgencies. Explore them, escape into observation and the pure glittering want of ‘why’. The void is an investment in the future, but this moment is just as rich and ripe for discovery. There is a glamour down here; the thrashing, wailing mourner of your mind is passion itself – and if you hold her lovingly, without judgment, she will bring you through to a self with the power to celebrate and sustain its own system through anything.

I’m so embarrassed! I’m sitting here trying to deny the complete inaccessibility of this morning’s post, not to mention its stomach churning irony. Ever push a truth so far it turned into its own satire? Just spent 3 hours picking the ‘right’ words for a painfully intellectualized argument for genetic honesty pursued through epigenetics and personal consciousness to ease universal energy flow… ya I’m WTF-ing along with you. My apologies!! Can’t believe I just wanked all over the screen and wasted both of our time. I fell into that ol’ well-worn prefrontal trap of overthinking and once again cut myself off (this time through isolating, alienating language – although I did throw in a Kardashian) from the one real reason to change – connection. There, now I’m tearing up so I know it has to be true.

So why change? Why risk the void as your brain chemistry adjusts to a new set of thoughts and behaviors? Flat out – to build the path of least resistance to deeper connection with the human experience. To share, to want, to satisfy, to explore. To love without fear because you know you are worth every effort. To love… with unrelenting compassion.

Change is just a way of reshuffling ‘want’ to get you out of your own head and into the most full and welcoming human experience possible. Because we’re only here for a geological blink – may as well bliss out as many times, and as epically as we can. There are a thousand constructs to explain the unfathomable (my last post makes it 1001 lol) but essentially, you already know the truth. In every cell of our bodies, we all do. After years of dedicated meditation I can wax on about energy and supernovas and different ways of touching the ultimate expression of universal bliss – and believe me I will – but all I’ve ever wanted is to wake up looking forward to the day. I’ve fought for that gift, with everything I have, and now all I want to do is share it. Darn it, the language is hard. And I’m going to mess up like I just did with my last post. So all I can promise you is that neither one of us will be alone for the journey. Now let’s get back to business with pre-training and the mindfulness key!

Short answer… So you can tell the truth. Not some sort of accountability to your friends and family bullshit, but permission to express and experience your genetic truth at a cellular level. This is clean energy flow. This is bliss. This is what Oprah’s driving at, what we’re all reaching for, but we’re missing the point by expanding its definition into our human social systems. Take truth back down to the surface of your skin, and deeper…to that delicate double helix that projects self to the very edges of our awareness and thus fills an entire universe.

So change? You have two tools to work with to clean up your energy game: epigenetics and personal consciousness. Epigenetics is, basically, the study of changes that alter how our genes are read. You can think of it as the Instagram filter your experience and environment applies to your DNA. Your personal consciousness (aka your awareness of you) is the Kim Kardashian of filter play. It’s always looking for its best angle, but so often operates from a distorted sense of self trained by external factors (cough cough Kanye). Personal consciousness isn’t the only factor affecting epigenetics, far from, but it is the easiest to control by bringing it back to its purest origins (stopping the laser hand treatments – don’t get me started!) and reawakening its authority within the brain through mindfulness techniques.

Personal consciousness can tweak the epigenetic filter to better align your bliss with the system beyond yourself (aka your realtime life) by altering your internal and external attentions to concurrently create and celebrate your most strategically storied cellular truth. Abstract? Only at first. The access key is mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is attention, um… you can start to see the logic here.

This process of change, altering our attentions to bring them more in line with our genetic selves and thus facilitating the flow of universal energy through our bodies, a leap of faith into the void. Our dopamine sparkle flickers out as we grope blindly for familiarity, for that stuffed crust pizza (oh sweet mercy!), that TMZ celebrity gossip, that glass of wine or cigarette. But there are far more primitive sources of reward… you were born knowing them. And a little pre-training will give you a foothold in the void.

What if you woke up in the pure, exquisite knowledge that every decision you’d ever made had been wrong? Because they led you here, where every moment is either an agony or an escape. Would you have the courage to call out to your tribe? Would they welcome you? Would they even recognize you after you’ve been gone so long?

Within the human experience, change can be defined as the process of altering our attentions. An attention is simply information (internal or external stimuli) that your brain has learned to recognize as a component of influence in your current system state. From noticing the very literal difference in wavelength between traffic lights to feeling the change in a lover’s heartbeat, our interpretations and responses to these attentions shape and colour our worlds.

So… change?

The ridiculously limited, but delightfully human, scope of our attentions finds its closest analogy in the electromagnetic spectrum, where what we see as visible light is proportionally infinitesimal when considered against the vast universal spectrum of wavelengths. Because our current attentions create our worlds, and since we can only model our experience on a tiny selection slice of the grand universe at any given time, we have a hell of a lot of worlds to chose from. But is it choice? Can we manually change our attentions?

Yes. But it will challenge every part of your being. And like the spectrum, when you step out of the habitual, what your brain has been trained to see, we step blind into true nothingness – the end of reward. This is the vast unfathomable, and the horror is real. We all know it; we’ve all reached out and cowered at its coldness, its meanness. But this is the only way back to your tribe. Welcome to the void…